Integration Can Improve Additive Manufacturing

Increased integration is needed to create a more traditional workflow in the additive manufacturing industry.

Currently, software options remain disjointed, forcing developers to use different programs to design, analyze and produce parts and systems using additive manufacturing.

Dr. Sanjay Joshi, a professor in the Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering Department at Penn State University, sat down with IMTSTV to talk about integration, which he deemed the biggest obstacle that additive manufacturing faces.

Dr. Joshi noted that right now, despite the use of innovative lattice structures to develop lightweight parts, engineers face software obstacles. For instance, they are forced to use one set of software to develop a lattice structure, another to analyze the structure, and yet another to create it. This use of multiple software systems leads to issues with how data is transitioned and translated.

Increasing the level of integration in the digital workflow will largely rest on the shoulders of CAD vendors and other developers who are supplying computational software, Dr. Joshi said. While individual software solutions currently exist, integrated software that can handle all the necessary computations is vital to future expansion of the industry, he argued.